Most donors and implementing agencies value development and humanitarian interventions that have enduring impact after closeout. Valuing Voices’ research indicates that despite more than $5 trillion investment in international programming since 1945, fewer than 1% of projects have been evaluated for sustained impact. Without doing such research our industry’s claim to do “sustainable development” (including achieving SDGs) falters.

Sustained and Emerging Impacts Evaluation (SEIE) emphasize long-term impacts, and not only the endurability of intended impacts, but also unintended, emerging impacts from country-nationals and new partners. Guidance on SEIEs as a new type of evaluation and our global, growing database of post project evaluations will be covered as will a description of Partners for Democratic Change’s evaluation. We had spirited discussion on how we can foster sustainability around the project cycle: from funding, partnership agreements and data collection to feedback, exit and post-project evaluation.